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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
A bold exploration of modern business risk in a volatile world where traditional rules no longer apply
In Unruly: Fighting Back when Politics, AI, and Law Upend the Rules of Business, co-founder of software company Hence Technologies and former Global Deputy CEO of Eurasia Group, Sean West, delivers a startlingly insightful new take on how politics, technology and law are converging to upend the rules of business, generating dangerous risks and incredible opportunities. West convincingly argues that we must understand all three factors to get leverage over the future – a future filled with eroding rule of law, deepfakes that upend elections and court decisions, government pressure for businesses to be patriotic, robot lobbyists, a flood of automated legal claims pointed directly at your company and much more.
Unruly offers detailed, practical advice for how to understand the world ahead, how to be resilient in the face of innumerable and complex challenges, and how to surround your business with the people and technology you need to excel in this environment.
Inside the book:
- A framework for understanding all of the pressures on modern corporations from the convergence of geopolitics, technology and law.
- Strategies for turning your company's legal department into a source of enduring competitive advantage
- How to navigate government pressure for nationalism when you have a global footprint
- Approaches to winning in a world where courts are politicized and the law is increasingly automated, built on interviews with top experts
- Ways to deal with the backlash to ESG at a company level
Perfect for executives, managers, entrepreneurs, founders, and other business leaders, Unruly is also a must-read for general counsels and the advisors who serve them.
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Seitenzahl: 397
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
COVER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR
UNRULY
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
FOREWORD BY ANDY BIRD
INTRODUCTION
THE UNRULY WORLD
FIGHTING BACK AGAINST UNRULINESS
NOTES
PART I: UNRULY RISK: WHAT IT IS AND HOW WE GOT HERE
CHAPTER ONE: THE UNRULY TRIANGLE
GEOLEGAL RISK
ARTIFICIAL POLITICS RISK
LEGALAI RISK
FIGHTING BACK
NOTES
CHAPTER TWO: AN UNRULY WORLD IS BORN
THE ROARING 90s
GEOLEGAL CONVERGENCE THROUGH ECONOMICS
GEOLEGAL CONVERGENCE THROUGH SECURITY
FINANCIAL INTEGRATION AND COLLAPSE
2016: TWO LEGS OF THE UNRULY TRIANGLE EMERGE
COVID AND A LEGAL LOCKDOWN
ENTER LEGALAI
TOWARD AN UNRULY WORLD
NOTES
PART II: GEOLEGAL RISK: WHEN POLITICS AND LAW COLLIDE
CHAPTER THREE: UNRULING AMERICA: THE EYE OF THE STORM
UNRULING
A BIAS FOR SOMETHING
AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM?
FIGHTING BACK: THE GEOLEGAL LINE OF DEFENSE
NOTES
CHAPTER FOUR: UNRULY CONFLICT: WAR WITHOUT GUARDRAILS
THE POLITICAL VECTOR: UNBOUNDED WAR
FROM LAW TO LAWFARE
FIGHTING BACK: GEOLEGAL STRATEGIC PLANNING
NOTES
CHAPTER FIVE: UNRULY SECURITY: YOU'VE BEEN DRAFTED FOR BATTLE
PATRIOTS AND NATIONAL CHAMPIONS
NATIONAL SECURITY REVIEWS
FIGHTING BACK: CORPORATE DIPLOMACY
NOTES
CHAPTER SIX: UNRULY SAFETY: PROTECTING OURSELVES WITH GLASS CASES
WHY IS THE LAW NOT ENFORCED AT A LOCAL LEVEL?
TECHNOLOGY TO THE RESCUE?
FIGHTING BACK: STAY OR GO?
NOTES
PART III: ARTIFICIAL POLITICS: WHEN POLITICS AND TECHNOLOGY COLLIDE
CHAPTER SEVEN: UNRULY FUTURE: WHEN AI EATS DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM
TECH AND JOBS
POWER DYNAMICS
BUY THEM OFF … OR ELSE
SHOULD MORE TECHNOLOGY MEAN MORE DEMOCRACY?
SURVEILLANCE
CRYPTO
RISKS TO DEMOCRACY
FIGHTING BACK: YOUR AI MANIFESTO
NOTES
CHAPTER EIGHT: UNRULY TECH: A SECTOR YOU CAN'T REGULATE
A GAME YOU CAN'T WIN
WHOSE LAW IS IT ANYWAY?
A PARALLEL ECONOMY
FIGHTING BACK
NOTES
CHAPTER NINE: UNRULY TRUTH: DEEPFAKES AND THE LIAR'S DIVIDEND
DEEPFAKES AND ELECTIONS
THE LIAR'S DIVIDEND
FIGHTING BACK: TALK LESS, SMILE MORE
NOTES
CHAPTER TEN: UNRULY WAR‐BOTS: THE INTERNET OF WEAPONS
ARTIFICIAL POLITICS AND WAR
COMPANIES AS COMBATANTS
FIGHTING BACK: RETHINK INSURANCE
NOTES
CHAPTER ELEVEN: UNRULY VALUES: WHEN EVERYTHING IS ABOUT EVERYTHING
WOKENESS
BATTLING OVER VALUES
EVERYTHING IS ABOUT EVERYTHING
FIGHTING BACK: SAFETY IN NUMBERS
NOTES
PART IV: LEGALAI: WHEN LAW AND TECHNOLOGY COLLIDE
CHAPTER TWELVE: UNRULY LAW: EMPOWERMENT THROUGH NEW LEGAL WEAPONS
AUTOMATED LAW
CATCH YOU IF I CAN
SOLVING ACCESS TO JUSTICE
ROBOT LOBBYISTS
FIGHTING BACK: FIGHT AI WITH AI
NOTES
PART V: FIGHTING BACK
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: FIGHTING BACK: UNRULY DOOM LOOPS AND FLYWHEELS
THE SHAPE OF RISK
THE SHAPE OF YOU
MONITORING YOUR WORLD
UNRULY DOOM LOOPS AND UNRULY FLYWHEELS
FROM UNRULY TO RULY
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INDEX
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Guide
COVER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR UNRULY
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
FOREWORD BY ANDY BIRD
INTRODUCTION
BEGIN READING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INDEX
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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ADDITIONAL PRAISE FOR UNRULY
“Sean has written a must‐read guide for a complex, chaotic world, connecting the dots between geopolitics, AI, and law to create a compelling and integrated understanding of the risk landscape. His core message is one that will help CEOs, leaders, and anyone interested in a better future to thrive in our turbulent times.”
—Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI
“Sean West provides sharp, practical guidance for CEOs trying to navigate an era where conventional wisdom no longer applies. Whether it is an increasingly inconsistent and fraught regulatory environment, the culture wars around corporate responsibility, or the exponential rise in global volatility, there are few norms and rules to anchor strategic decisions. This book provides tactics and ideas to build resilience in an era where it has never been so difficult to run a business. It's the perfect complement to my own book, Higher Ground.”
—Alison Taylor, Clinical Associate Professor at NYU Stern, and author of Higher Ground
“Unruly is truly a must‐read! Globalism is gone, standards have eroded, expectations are different, and change is everywhere! Sean West presents the ‘now and future’ of a world writhing under the intertwined impacts of geopolitics, law, and artificial intelligence. With broad scope and deep insights, Mr. West proves his points with incisive interpretations of example after example. Readable, fun, worrisome, profound: this is a book for professionals, business leaders, and the general public. Sean West proves ‘we aren't going back.’ ”
—Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe
“There are many books about politics, law, or technology. But Unruly is one of the very few books designed to help the modern CEO and general counsel take effective action in the midst of volatility that involves all these factors. It's a must‐read for any senior executive who is seeking to navigate today's tumult.”
—C. Allen Parker, former CEO and General Counsel of Wells Fargo
“A truly thought‐provoking, compelling book – and a must‐read for leaders at every level and in every sector. Sean West's novel and persuasive assertion that politics, AI, and law are converging to generate ever more challenging global risks makes Unruly critical reading for those at the helm of companies, government institutions, and nonprofit organizations alike. And his prescriptions for dealing with the increasing unruliness around the world are of enormous value to those trying to navigate the new global order (and the growing disorder in it).”
—General David Petraeus (US Army, Ret.), former Commander of the Surge in Iraq, US Central Command, and NATO/US Forces in Afghanistan; former Director of the CIA; and co‐author of the New York Times bestselling book, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Gaza
“In a world where technology, geopolitics, and law collide to rewrite the rules of business, Unruly offers a bold and indispensable roadmap. Sean's insights empower leaders to navigate volatility, confront novel risks, and shape the future rather than be shaped by it.”
—Enrico Letta, former Prime Minister of Italy
“West's ‘Unruly Triangle’ is a powerful new framework for understanding our chaotic present. By showing how technology, law, and politics interact to create novel risks and opportunities, he gives business leaders a practical toolkit for navigating – and thriving in – an increasingly turbulent world.”
—Azeem Azhar, founder of Exponential View
“A brilliant and thought‐provoking analysis, providing CEOs and general counsel alike with an essential framework for anticipating and navigating risk in an increasingly unruly world.”
—Bjarne Tellmann, former General Counsel of Haleon
“Unruly is a masterful synthesis capturing the interplay of current affairs and the law. A fascinating read for every lawyer.”
—Cherie Blair, CBE, KC
“Unruly is a must‐read for business leaders and those helping them navigate global risks. West has masterfully captured a fundamental shift underway at the intersections of geopolitics, law, and technology that we risk overlooking, and guides us through a changed world and the new set of rules for operating in it.”
—Lewis Sage‐Passant, PhD, Global Head of Intelligence at Novo Nordisk, Adjunct Professor at Sciences Po Paris, and founder of Encyclopedia Geopolitica
“This book should be required reading for every CEO, investor, or regular American who wants to understand – and get ahead of – the coming global, political, legal, and technological risks that are inevitable in our new and unruly world.”
—Brody Mullins, Pulitzer‐prize winner and co‐author of The Wolves of K Street
“Sean West brilliantly captures the compounding threats –breakdowns in politics, legal systems and the employment base of society itself –because of the impact of AI. For the business reader, this is an uncomfortable, but indispensable, guide to navigating the engulfing triple threat.”
—Lord Mark Malloch‐Brown, former Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations
“Unruly brilliantly dissects how the intersections of politics, law, and technology are reshaping global business. Sean West's expertise and insights makes this indispensable guide for leaders facing high‐stakes decisions in an increasingly volatile environment.”
—Bridget McCormack, President and CEO of American Arbitration Association, and former Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court
“Business, politics, technology, law, culture, and inequality are much more interconnected than we realize. For years, Sean West has briefed CEOs and their management teams on unseen systemic risk roiling worldwide. Although facts, data, and technical knowledge are essential to this task, the rarest ability is to make the risk simple, intelligible, and plain. I suggest buying Unruly and putting it by your bedside, reading a chapter a night. In a world of empty‐calorie pundits, Unruly is pure protein.”
—Bill Henderson, Editor of Legal Evolution, and Professor of Law at Indiana Maurer School of Law
“The development of AI, including its potential and risks, is undoubtedly one of the defining topics of our time. Any reflection aimed at organizing our thoughts on the matter is an investment in the future. For that future to be truly human, we must continue considering the implications of AI. Few resources are more valuable for doing so effectively than Sean West's book.”
—José María Aznar, former Prime Minister of the Spanish government
“As the complex and irresistible forces at the intersection of geopolitics, law, and technology wreak havoc on the established perspectives of risk, Unruly provides invaluable and practical insights into both the emerging challenges and the techniques needed to successfully navigate what lies ahead. An essential read for every CEO and general counsel leading through complexity and every law firm leader seeking to remain their trusted adviser of choice.”
—Matthew Layton, former Global Managing Partner at Clifford Chance
“The future belongs to companies and leaders who can successfully navigate geopolitics and economic statecraft. The rise of AI – which quite literally has the ability to reshape everything we do – further highlights this critical skillset. West's Unruly provides a framework for leaders as they attempt to see around corners and find opportunity in an increasingly dynamic, fast‐moving, and multi‐stakeholder world.”
—Rob Beard, Chief Legal and Global Affairs Officer at Coherent Corp.
“Unruly is an original piece of thinking that will do for law what Graham Allison did for bureaucracy or Robert Jervis for psychology. Weaponize Unruly for the purposes of geopolitical analysis.”
—Marko Papic, Macro‐Geopolitical Chief Strategist at BCA Research, and author of Geopolitical Alpha
“Unruly makes sense of the extraordinary changes in law, geopolitics, and technology that today frame the environment of business. Clearly, understanding these forces and how they interact is vital for planning and implementing a successful corporate strategy.”
—Richard Vietor, Emeritus Professor at Harvard Business School
UNRULY
FIGHTING BACK WHEN POLITICS, AI, AND LAW UPEND THE RULES OF BUSINESS
SEAN WEST
Copyright © 2025 by Sean West. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data is Available:
ISBN 9781394318452 (Cloth)
ISBN 9781394318469 (ePub)
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Cover Design: Jon Boylan
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Author Photo: Courtesy of author
To my Dad who showed me the world
To my Mom who showed me to care for everyone in it
To my Wife who works to make it better
To my Kids who give me hope for it
FOREWORD BY ANDY BIRD
The world is changing in dramatic ways. Politics is nastier and more volatile than it has been in decades. Technological advancement is opening up great promise and potential perils. The law is less clear, less stable, and less predictably enforced than at any point in my decades leading global companies. The world, as Sean puts it, is becoming unruly.
As a result of these changes, the rules of business are also changing. And, as is always the case, it is the modern CEO's responsibility not just to anticipate these changes but to navigate and, indeed, fight back against them when they threaten the businesses we lead.
It's a lonely life being a CEO. There you are at the top of the pedestal with everyone looking at you, watching your every move, and passing judgment on how you look, speak, and act. Your investors, your chairperson, the board, your direct reports and employees, and your customers all hang on every word. The list is endless, and the job can be relentless.
Ultimately, you're paid to ensure the company, employees, and stakeholders thrive. You're paid to make brilliant decisions at breakneck speed. That's much harder in an unruly world.
The stock market, investors, and financial analysts operate in the “black and white” of P&Ls, balance sheets, and operating margins. A successful CEO must be totally on top of these elements. But a CEO must also manage the gray. The “gray” comes with how you create a narrative, how you inject creativity, how you look after the human capital as much as the financial capital in your company, and, most importantly, how you mitigate risk.
Mitigating risk isn't a job solely for your chief risk officer, your chief legal officer, or your chief technology officer. It's ultimately your responsibility and many times risk, legal, and IT are under resourced and not front and center of the “business.” I compare this sometimes to the fire extinguisher philosophy. If you work in an environment where there's a potential for fire, it's pretty handy to have a fire extinguisher close by. But most people don't know how to properly utilize it when a fire occurs. It sits in a corner out of sight and out of mind until there is a fire and panic. That's not great for preparedness.
At the heart of all of this is managing risk. Risk should be front and center of everything you do, but the trouble is that risk doesn't work nine to five—events happen at the most inconvenient times and in the most unlikely places. So, when that happens many CEOs are on the backfoot and scrambling for information and advice to make decisions.
But with the advent of technology it's easy to stay current because risk is constantly evolving, constantly changing, literally on a day‐to‐day basis. You simply have to choose to prioritize this.
I experienced this firsthand, as CEO of Pearson PLC, the world's leading learning company and a member of the FTSE 100 in the United Kingdom. Pearson operates in more than 100 countries around the world with a diverse set of businesses all focused on improving individuals' opportunities to learn and advance themselves in society. To support this mission, we employ tens of thousands of people. Sadly, risk events happened all too frequently and many times without warning.
I can recall when Russia attacked Kyiv and started the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. I was faced with multiple decisions around how to mitigate the risk to our business, our employees, and our stakeholders. I started to triage the multitude of tasks from a legal, product, and people perspective. What is the impact on my business? How do I safely evacuate my employees stuck in Ukraine? How can we maintain business continuity when our talented software engineers are being displaced? Then there were the ensuing Russian sanctions. I had to prepare briefings for my chairman, my board, our investors, and, most importantly, my employees. Having invested in proactive scenario planning and putting desktop exercises to work helped immensely. It was also important to have trusted up‐to‐date information on the geopolitical ramifications and have that information in real time, as the situation rapidly escalated.
Unfortunately, these occurrences, however big or small, occur with greater frequency. We live in a constantly shifting and unstable geopolitical landscape.
In my prior role as chairman of Walt Disney International, I was responsible for overseeing the company's many business activities outside the United States. How do we make Disney locally relevant to consumers and expand our presence in emerging markets? First and foremost, the question I always asked myself was: How do I mitigate risk for the company? So, understanding the political landscape, the regulatory landscape, infrastructure, and the like was vital.
What's the first step in formulating a market‐entry strategy? Too many companies take a global view based around domestic and international. You cannot go on vacation to international. You visit an individual country, culture, people, political, and legislative framework. So, I set about asking a simple question: How do we go from being the Walt Disney Company, India to being the Indian Walt Disney Company? How do we go from being the Walt Disney Company, China to being the Chinese Walt Disney Company? We asked that question for every single country we operated in, so that, ultimately, we could be more relevant and not take a one‐size‐fits‐all approach. To be relevant to consumers in each of these markets, we had to tailor our strategies accordingly.
It's not just geopolitical risk; there's also risk associated with technology. I remember vividly on November 30, 2022, when Open AI released ChatGPT to the public. Suddenly the world became aware of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and there was a scramble to determine which companies would benefit from generative AI and which would be at risk. Ironically, it was people who made those decisions: I found myself spending increasing time assessing the impact for Pearson to quickly relay a narrative to the analysts, investors, our board, and employees. As we've seen, AI provides many compelling opportunities but also many risks, and having the tools at hand to fully comprehend what this means for your business on a country‐by‐country basis in real time is vitally important.
That's why I love the premise of Sean's book. He is using his decades‐long experience advising companies and investors on geopolitical risk and marrying that with deep research and insight about new technology and the law in order to track a new combined phenomenon he calls “unruliness.” By connecting the dots across each of these areas, Sean reveals that the world we are entering is riskier than we appreciate, which is to say that the world will be characterized both by volatility and by an erosion of rules of the game we CEOs take for granted. He then takes that new world of risk and tries to show us how we can fight back against it—not just to manage risk but to use it to our competitive advantage.
The world is no longer so simple that CEOs can have a direct report responsible for politics, another for law, and another for technology—all operating within their own siloes to control risk. Instead, the risks companies face will be multifaceted, and the CEO will need an integrated team to be successful. Great CEOs fully engage all parts of the business. They proactively integrate sales and growth functions along with risk, legal, and governance functions. When you do this, you get a more disparate set of perspectives and inputs to help your decision‐making and if there is ever an event, then risk, legal, and governance functions are totally up to speed with the business leaders and the needs of the business.
Every successful CEO must now look up from their daily fire drills to realize that the world is on fire. I guess the very fact that you're reading this demonstrates you know the importance of a proactive approach to managing risk in an increasingly unruly world. Enjoy!
—Andy Bird
Former CEO, Pearson
Former president and chairman, Disney International
INTRODUCTION
Ten years ago, I was a high‐flying forecaster of U.S. politics. Literally, I was flying hundreds of thousands of miles a year around the world to brief CEOs and investors on the risks they faced from politics. I would see a bank CEO in Johannesburg, and then I'd shower on the plane en route to brief a Gulf sovereign wealth fund. I'd marvel at the quality of the carpet in the C‐suites in Tokyo. Then I'd head to New York to be grilled by hedge fund principals who I often spoke to more times a day than to my wife.
The politics in Washington were like nothing the business community had seen in recent memory. President Obama was deep into his second term and couldn't get much done. The government had recently been shut down by an increasingly fractious Republican Party that made good on a once‐in‐a‐generation threat. The U.S. credit rating had been downgraded, and there was a risk of a technical debt default at every turn.
I was churning out tons of research on the rise of populism in American politics and how it was potentially going to bring America to the brink of a catastrophe. In June 2014, I spoke to the New York Times about the electoral defeat of a member of Congress who I said was “the hub for big corporations that could trust him to get things done … the one standing between the conservative pitchforks and the business community.”1
I read the paper the next day and nearly spat out my coffee: the Times had highlighted that statement in its front section, as the “Quotation of the Day.” How could something so banal be the day‐defining statement? Well, as risky as the world seemed in 2014, it was pretty tame compared to what we see today.
As I pen this introduction, recent Quotations of the Day include a Sudanese refugee lamenting “This is not freedom” as anti‐immigrant riots raged in his adopted English town.2 There is a Russian journalist speaking amid air‐raid sirens from a Ukrainian incursion, asserting that “Silence is salvation. We live according to Orwell.”3 There is a Lebanese taxi driver stating that “It was cool to wake up and find that I was alive” as Israel's conflict with Hezbollah escalated.4 The defeat of Eric Cantor for Congress in 2014, which I had been quoted about, is meaningless against that backdrop.
Back then, politics in developed countries generally existed inside the normal probability curve. Pendulums swung back and forth. Politicians had traditional incentives. Political parties cared about support from business. Candidates could beat up on globalization, free trade, and open markets in public but still vote for them when no one was looking. Politicians rarely used violent rhetoric and were castigated for much less. The hottest issues were about tax breaks and healthcare coverage.
To say that much has changed is a severe understatement.
In today's world, presidential candidates are convicted of felonies and then go on to win the popular and Electoral College vote, with foreign actors and the world's richest person all battling to influence the results. Consumer devices like pagers are weaponized and detonated against adversaries—with no regard for legal consequences. New artificial intelligence (AI) tools scale to 100 million users in weeks—well before lawmakers can figure out how they work let alone how to regulate them. International economic relationships—like that between Western countries and Russia—can be canceled instantly, leading businesses to scramble to salvage value. And, of course, they can be turned back on too.
It's not enough to say this world is characterized by volatility and uncertainty. Politics often rewards outlandish promises, deceit, conflict, and punching down before the pendulum swings back to optimism.
No, to get leverage over the world today, we need to look deeper. When many of the world's political systems shift at the same time—and shift in the ways they interact with each other—something more serious is afoot.
All this turmoil has led some to declare that we live in a world of “polycrisis” where everything that can go wrong will.5 While certainly we live in a world of overlapping risk, that type of casting rolls together near‐term and very far‐off risks into the same analysis, while ultimately giving the impression there is little we can do to defend ourselves.
To get leverage over what's ahead, we need to bound our perspective and force ourselves to be concrete in our diagnoses. This book will argue the culprit for today's unruliness is the intersection of three main forces all changing at once.
The first force, geopolitics, is consistently cited as a top worry for CEOs. And it is suddenly more complex than ever before. The United States and China are trying to splinter the world into spheres, while many countries simply want to produce in China and ally with the U.S. military. Wars are raging in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Africa as a result of geopolitical games being played by Russia and Iran. National politics in many countries is more polarized than ever.
The second force, law, is both eroding and becoming weaponized. Rule of law is receding across the world while the day‐to‐day rules and laws governing business are becoming tools of conflict.
The third force, technological innovation more generally and AI more specifically, threatens to upend and circumvent politics, law, and the overall organization of the economy. And it is doing so faster than any of us can truly appreciate.
As a result, the traditional rules of business are about to come crashing down in ways we can already see before our eyes. Business leaders need a new toolkit to manage the fallout.
This is not simply a world of political and legal risk or a world undergoing technological change. This is, in fact, a world where politics, technology, and law intersect to create new synthetic risks not previously contemplated. It is an unruly world.
THE UNRULY WORLD
The term “unruly” generally means disorderly or unable to be controlled. No doubt, the ongoing political volatility in the world gives that impression, as do the effects of relentless technological innovation. But I chose the title of Unruly for this book because it's not just volatility alone. It's the destruction of rules and laws—the literal “unruling” of the world—that amplifies the challenge to business in the years ahead.
Society is built on mutual acceptance of rules and laws, not just having laws on the books. These laws form the backbone of how citizens and businesses navigate their everyday lives. Companies make business decisions based on protections they expect from the law, or calculated risks based on their best understanding of it. Firms will avoid entering markets that do not have a strong tradition of rules and laws. Today, it is hard to find a market where the law has not become politicized.
As the world globalized over the last few decades, Western conceptions of rule of law were exported to emerging markets. Increased global trade brought billions out of poverty and reinforced a need for a rules‐based order that could make everyone rich. Institutions like the United Nations pushed for international development goals that were supposed to reflect an evolving set of universal values and businesses clambered for international standards and arbiters, like the World Trade Organization, to simplify and police international commerce. Great powers, like the United States, Europe, Russia, and China, largely avoided conflict as they focused on consolidating wealth accumulation for the citizens and the state.
The era of globalization was a time characterized by tremendous economic growth as geopolitics and technology combined to bring the world closer together in a way that necessitated constructing legal rules and institutions. This convergence on rules and norms buttressed further growth and expansion, as businesses unleashed massive investment on the basis of increasing legal and regulatory certainty. Even as the world dealt with the COVID‐19 pandemic in 2020, countries were able to implement substantial first‐wave lockdowns and close down international commerce as if flipping a switch—reinforcing some sense of control and order even at a moment of sheer chaos.
The world is now facing the specter that a number of geopolitical and technological factors risk setting in motion a dramatic unwinding of the rules of business. And because the legal framework that created globalization is receding faster than globalization itself, there is much more exposure to this than commonly appreciated.
On the political side, we are in uncharted territory.
Anti‐elitism, xenophobia, and populism converged to deliver or sustain semi‐authoritarian leadership in once democratic countries like Hungary. In other cases, such factors made countries look increasingly inward, as the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union demonstrated—undermining decades of legal institution building.
President Donald Trump's return to power as part of a global anti‐incumbent trend in 2024 was due in part to a backlash to the world rules created. In the waning days of the pandemic, populations became fatigued with government policies and simply started ignoring them—raising questions about whether they would ever follow such rules again and elevating politicians who didn't play by the rules either. A push toward increasing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and diversity standards has actually triggered a movement against them, catapulting culture wars back to the national stage and causing divergent perspectives between the United States and Europe. Modern technology companies believe regulators are too slow to regulate properly, so better to break the rules and ask for forgiveness than to be constrained—a mindset that carries over when such figures decide to play politics, as in the case of tech titan Elon Musk.
The last few years have become just as treacherous on an international level. Russia invading Ukraine flies in the face of simply believing that modern European borders are settled law. Conflict in the Middle East raises daily questions about the laws of war—from targeted cross‐border assassinations to a staggering human cost of conflict. Tensions between the West and China risk turning companies from independent actors into proxy extensions of the state against their desire not to be that.
Technology is perhaps the most important factor to understand where we are headed, as it can serve either as an accelerant or as a disruptor to the political direction of travel. The rise of AI threatens to upend the entire employment infrastructure of modern economies, which will call into question the social safety net structure of the modern state. It will also present opportunities for leaders to deploy surveillance systems and predictive governance approaches we can barely contemplate to consolidate authoritarian rule. Everything from the space economy to digital assets will hinge on this interplay between technology and law.
Moreover, technology will directly impact rules and laws themselves. Innovation brings the marginal cost of digital products to zero, and it will do the same with law. When it costs nothing to file lawsuits, the law will be weaponized like cyberattacks. Robot lobbyists will serve entrenched interests to reinforce their advantages. Companies will let their AIs negotiate with the AIs of other companies in lieu of going to court or arbitration—turning legal disputes into optimization problems. Citizens will increasingly be able to practice machine‐aided law themselves, with profound implications.
This new era requires much more than a sense that politics and technology breed uncertainty, which has been the core thesis of many analysts. Rather, if we appreciate that we face unique variations of political, legal, and technological risk while also facing new risks from the intersections of these factors, then we can start to get leverage over the future.
FIGHTING BACK AGAINST UNRULINESS
You picked this book up because you feel something is fundamentally shifting in the world today. It's not just volatility—there is an increasing sense that the systems we live in are on the ballot at every election. Companies are not just takers in this new world: They can look at how geopolitics, technology, and the law are upending the rules of business and fight back. But to do so, new strategies are needed.
Businesses must realize that they are organized for an old world of siloed risk. Today, political risk is dealt with by monitoring and lobbying while legal risk is mitigated in court with the best legal support money can buy. Technological governance exists almost as an independent entity focused on cybersecurity and data privacy while innovation serves to outcompete in the market rather than in court or in Congress. The new world requires embracing complexity and organizing for risks that change shape and permeate corporate boundaries.
The U.S. banking industry, for example, has been under pressure from all of these forces. Politicians love to beat up on big finance in the name of protecting consumers. Laws and regulations are passed by many jurisdictions—often with an eye toward past crises—creating a cat‐and‐mouse game of compliance or hoping to skate by undetected. Traditional players reconstitute themselves to go around the letter of the law. Financial technology moves faster than regulators can keep up with while innovative challengers do their best to disrupt traditional banking. And the intersection of these factors—politicized regulatory actions and pushes for digitally open banking—create additional layers of challenge.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of America's largest bank, JP Morgan Chase, had enough of the unruliness. He recently told the American Bankers Association “It is time to fight back … if you're in a knife fight, you better bring a knife, and that's where we are.”6 Dimon noted that many banks are afraid to fight with their regulators because they fear retaliation but at some point that becomes a risk worth taking. “Things are becoming unfair and unjust, and they are hurting companies,” he asserted.
What may seem like a uniquely pugnacious position taken by one of the world's top bankers is the mindset all businesses must adopt going forward. Businesses must shift to a war footing, anticipating threats that are attacking from every angle and proactively defeating them.
Those threats might be new policies from a change in government made more likely due to voter manipulation via deepfakes. It might be thousands of legal cases filed against your company via robot lawyers steered by disgruntled employees. It might be unbridled technological advancement by competitors who simply ignore the law to steal market share—or steal your intellectual property because they have a finger on the scales of justice. It might be some confluence of politics, law, and technology that manifests in completely novel ways.
Today's political and innovation cycles move too fast to ignore for very long. Businesses that favor a reactive posture will find themselves overwhelmed by change and unable to catch up. Those that fight back have a real chance of success.
Core to success will be learning to embrace the chaos around you and to use it to your advantage. If you can correctly diagnose which force you are fighting—politics, technology, law, or some combination—you can implement strategies that will give you significant advantages over competitors who will be whipsawed around by change.
Fighting back against the forces upending business—and using these same forces to your advantage—will enable you to thrive in an unruly world.
NOTES
1
. Peters, Jeremy W, and Shaila Dewan. “A Cantor Effect for Businesses and the G.O.P.” Nytimes.com.
The New York Times
, June 14, 2014.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/business/for‐businesses‐and‐the‐gop‐a‐cantor‐effect.html
.
2
. Yaqoob, Adam. “Quotation of the Day: Fleeing Sudan Conflict, Only to Find in England a Mob Menacing Them.”
The New York Times
, August 14, 2024.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/14/pageoneplus/quotation‐of‐the‐day‐fleeing‐sudan‐conflict‐only‐to‐find‐in‐england‐a‐mob‐menacing‐them.html
.
3
. Duntsova, Yekaterina S. “Quotation of the Day: Russians in the Kursk Region ‘Were Living Our Lives,’ Until the Incursion.”
The New York Times
, August 16, 2024.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/16/pageoneplus/quotation‐of‐the‐day‐russians‐in‐the‐kursk‐region‐were‐living‐our‐lives‐until‐the‐incursion.html
.
4
. Awada, Mohamad. “Quotation of the Day: Netanyahu Vows ‘Severe’ Reaction to Rocket Strike.”
The New York Times
, July 30, 2024.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/pageoneplus/quotation‐of‐the‐day‐netanyahu‐vows‐severe‐reaction‐to‐rocket‐strike.html
.
5
. Tooze, Adam. “Welcome to the World of the Polycrisis.”
Financial Times
, October 28, 2022.
https://www.ft.com/content/498398e7‐11b1‐494b‐9cd3‐6d669dc3de33
.
6
. Bautzer, Tatiana, and Nupur Anand. “JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Says ‘It's Time to Fight Back’ on Regulation.”
Reuters
, October 29, 2024.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/jpmorgan‐ceo‐says‐its‐time‐fight‐back‐regulation‐2024‐10‐28/
.
PART IUNRULY RISK: WHAT IT IS AND HOW WE GOT HERE
CHAPTER ONETHE UNRULY TRIANGLE
One morning I received a phone call from a Connecticut number while I was meeting with some colleagues. It might be a hedge fund with an urgent question, so I answered.
“Hey, Sean, can you talk?” I immediately recognized the voice on the other line, a well‐known global macro investor. I had logged more than 900 interactions with this client that year including no less than five emails that morning. But he had never called my cell phone.
“I'm actually in the middle of a meeting right now. Can I call you back in 20 minutes?” I asked, knowing there's no way that would be good enough.
“Sure, Sean. I just have one question for you, it will only take a minute. WHAT THE F—K IS GOING ON IN WASHINGTON?!”
Of course, that was not a one‐minute conversation.
This type of interaction was representative of my life as a geopolitical forecaster, where I honed the ability to rapidly digest any political shift in the world and put it into the context of “the economy” or “markets.” Such skills are highly sought after by Wall Street because an early understanding that a new political leader may crush a particular asset class is immediately actionable—investors can sell that asset, perhaps juiced by high leverage, and make a killing. When the political tides look likely to turn, they can buy it back. “Trump Trades”—Election Day bets on industries that would win or lose when the President returned to office—provide one such example.
The crux of such analysis is to get the trigger prediction correct. What are the odds a government will do a specific negative or positive thing in the next week? In the next month? In the next year? If you can consistently predict policy shocks, investors can make a lot of money expressing that thesis in the market.
In stable political environments, such prediction is possible. But world politics is becoming too complex to model and predict with any high degree of likelihood. As one artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer told me when I suggested using tech to model politics a decade ago: the smartest minds in the world had not figured out how to predict if you want to stream a tenth cat video after you watch nine of them. So predicting what an unstable and complex political system will do next feels somewhere between an educated guess and a fool's errand.
The good news is that, for corporations, the probability of an event is less important than anticipating or rapidly understanding impact. If you mine in South Africa and an antibusiness leader may come to power, you don't really have a choice about whether to stay or go—you're fixed there for a while. Thus, your real focus is not predicting who will win but understanding the impact and extent of such policy shifts so you can respond. This is more than figuring out what is being discussed so that the corporation can lobby against it. This is about figuring out what growth opportunities will be open or closed for that company in South Africa in the future with some level of specificity.
To do that, you need to bring political risk down to a much more concrete level. From my vantage point, the law provides grounding that suddenly makes such analysis much more actionable.
When a policy idea or a political promise meets the administrative state, it becomes a law or a regulation. It becomes something that the government could or will enforce in the courts. It becomes grounds for a commercial competitor to launch a legal challenge. It can create avenues for success in a place, or it can shut them down completely. With the exception of security risk—which is often conflated with political risk—most other politics is just noise.
The trick here is to realize that this is not just politics or law raising risk, but it is the intersection between the two. Throw in the way technology intersects with politics and law, and then the risk landscape become much more complex.
This is the essence of what I call “unruliness,” which is the concept that underlies this book. Unruliness results from the dynamic interplay of politics, technology, and law to create risks that don't fit neatly in any corporate silo. Crucially, it creates risks that change shape in real time and require agility to counter.
To conceptualize unruliness, I rely on a simple schematic called the “Unruly Triangle.” The core insight of the triangle is that each of the vertices—geopolitics, law, and technology—are connected to each other generating new risks that are constantly in flux.
Traditional risk frameworks tend to view the three vertices either as separate factors for risk analysis or as somewhat static such that an analysis of these factors can be done at a single moment of time and assumed to hold. To be clear, the world does present traditional political, legal, and technological risks. But the real source of anxiety for corporate leaders in the years ahead will be the way these intersections manifest.
Thus, we need to think about risk flowing up and down each leg of the triangle from the interactions of these factors. Politics determines not just what the law is but how, when, where, and even if it is applied. Stable politics allows for rule of law and rule of law supports stable politics. The law defines the conditions under which political contestation is permitted, proceeds, and is ultimately settled.
The law does the same for the arenas and pace of technological advancement. Technology transforms the broad social and economic conditions that influence how politics is played at home and abroad and can be used to determine narrow political outcomes. It is also an instrument that can revolutionize all modalities of law for better or for worse—surveillance, enforcement, representation, adjudication, and punishment. New technologies require new legal frameworks, and those frameworks ensure technology remains appropriately regulated.
Rather than being separate risks, for each of these three factors, there is a push and pull that's largely imperfect and rarely stable. But historically a rough equilibrium is achieved and populations, businesses, and lawmakers understand and may even respect the parameters.
This book is sounding the alarm that we are in an extended moment of flux where the process of getting to a new equilibrium will be nasty, risky, and long. This generates three novel risks—Geolegal Risk, Artificial Politics Risk, and LegalAI Risk.
